Research themes

Share

Our research focus is on analysing the spatial and temporal interactions of humans and the environment, and the development of new methods and approacher to do so with novel data sources and analysis methods. Our research is divided under three closely interrelated themes: 1) human mobility & accessibility 2) nature conservation and 3) development of novel analysis approaches utilising big and open data sources.

Mobility and accessibility

Our societies witness unprecedentedly increasing mobilities of everything - people, objects, capital, and information - and constitute to the space of flows in the global network society. Mobilities and underlying patterns of spatial accessibility are shaping our societies, natural environment and the interplay between society and nature. To understand how our society functions and influences surrounding environment, we need to know more about patterns of accessibility and mobility. Our group uses a range of novel data sources and develops new methods to analyze these topics, and we believe that combining novel data sources and tools can provide knowledge that is impossible to obtain purely with conventional methods. For more information about our work on accessibility and mobility, please visit Accessibility Research Group's website.

Nature conservation

Biodiversity and ecosystem services conservation is crucial to enhance human well-being and prevent risks to our society. Creating a balance among conservation, food production and other needs for human and economic development remains one of the grand challenges of our society and is a key goal now embedded in UN the Sustainable Development Goals. Our group uses interdisciplinary conservation science and cutting edge analyses, making use of novel data sources (e.g. social media data), to address some of the key issues in biodiversity conservation. Our current interests and expertise are in land use planning, biodiversity and ecosystem services economics, and global wildlife trade.

Novel data and methods

We live in the information era and the amount data being collected about individuals and the environment is growing exponentially. Various actively and passively collected data, such as social media data or mobile phone calls, provide an additional source of information for research and decision-making. Taking full advantage of the growing body of data on humans and the environment requires novel data mining, analysis and visualisation methods. In our work, we take advantage of the recent advancements in the fields of geoinformatics, transportation modelling, digital conservation and digital humanities, just to name a few. Whenever possible, the tools and data developed in the Digital Geography Lab are shared openly.